Page 25 of Dead Beat

“They made their own curse and left it for us.” Dawes gestured to the diary pages. “When Kittscher scrubbed the records, they weren’t just hiding the Gauntlet or the journey. They were covering up the bargain they made. Remember what Golgarot said: They walked away with wealth and power.”

Darlington nearly knocked over his wineglass. “That isn’t what he said.” Alex recognized his look, startled and studious, the mad scientist finding the flaw in his own equation. “Not all of it. Golgarot said, They walked away with wealth and power, stores of ancient knowledge and good fortune. I didn’t see it before, but you’re right. He was being specific—four gifts for the societies. Good fortune probably went to Reiter and Skull and Bones, the society of prognostication. Knowledge had to be for the scholar, for Lethe.”

“Sounds like Kittscher,” said Dawes. “He loved his theories.”

And the sound of his own voice. Alex had struggled not to fall asleep making her way through Kittscher’s speeches in the Daemonologie.

“Power for the soldier?” Darlington mused.

Soldier, your hour draws closer. But who was he? Had he made it back from hell?

“Anyone else feel like we got cheated?” Alex asked.

“We did escape with our lives,” said Dawes.

“Sure, but where’s my parting gift?”

Alex hadn’t wanted to tell the others about Alban Reed’s threats or what he’d said about her bloodline. They would push her even harder to raise the issue of her father with Mira. And maybe she should. Reed had said nothing else that indicated he was somehow eavesdropping on their conversations at Il Bastone. If he had been he would have threatened to bring their use of the Gauntlet to light or the fact that they were sheltering a vampire, or that Darlington was part demon now. And yet, somehow he knew what Alex was and what she could do. She had no intention of making a nexus for him, but she would have to lead him on until she figured out who his source was and how dangerous that person might be to her. And then what? Reed was powerful far beyond the world of Yale and Lethe. He had connections to tech, to the military, and to endless stores of magic.

Death comes on swift wings. It was waiting for her. Alex could see it, perched in the towers above the university like the demon on the night of their first hunt, like Reiter in his den. It was biding its time, and eventually death would find its moment.

Some part of her didn’t care. She was tired. She was bruised. She was sick of trying to swim against the current with weights tied to her ankles. But when she thought of what might be waiting for her on the other side of the Veil? Of Golgarot laying claim to her soul? That was the thing she feared: not death but the yoke. She’d suffered enough in this life. She wasn’t going to let anyone make her suffer in the next.

They agreed to visit Thomas Neumann’s house on Wednesday—in very bright daylight. Alex had Science, Morality, and Taboo in the morning, a class that helped fulfill her science requirement and that thankfully involved absolutely no science. She would have the rest of the day free, and they’d have plenty of sunny hours to investigate. If Kittscher really had become a vampire, they would be challenging him in his nest, and Alex wasn’t going to take any chances. She would be going in armed, and more importantly, she would have Darlington with her. She tried to let the thought reassure her. As long as there was a clear task before them, being around him wasn’t so difficult. The man was honorable. The demon was lethal. That was what mattered. That should be enough.

Alex didn’t want to think about Darlington, and she didn’t want to imagine the horrors waiting for them in Rhode Island, so she took those blessed days free of Lethe and its monsters to catch up on reading, to eat, to sleep as much as she possibly could—and to try to fix things with Mercy. Alex knew this might not be a break that would mend. She’d needed a way to get free of Eitan, and hell had required a murderer to fulfill its blood price. Mercy had known what Alex intended, but she’d been drunk on magic, too high on the thrill of secrecy and scheming to think about the reality of taking another person’s life. Alex had known it, and she had let Mercy stumble headlong into the consequences.

She caught her on the way into their Shakespeare in Cinema lecture, only the fourth lecture of the semester. Alex had missed the second and third and could admit that she hadn’t been paying particularly close attention through the first. She’d been too exhausted and too rattled by the prospect of hell knocking on Yale’s door. But she should have been more attentive—not just to Professor Girard but to Mercy too, to how diligently she was taking notes, to the shine in her eyes when she talked about this course. She had a crush. That wasn’t the end of the world. But Lauren’s alarm bells had rung, and Alex wasn’t going to dismiss that.

Now, watching Charlie Girard, she hated to acknowledge it, but she got the appeal. He had a rock-star vibe—expensive jeans, black T-shirt, black boots, leather cuff. The man clearly liked the gym, and he had a head of messy honey-blond hair that took the edge off early middle age. He prowled back and forth on the stage, gesturing to the slides on the screen behind him grandly like he was conducting an orchestra.

Alex was surprised by the number of Grays in the classroom—usually they avoided the wandering thoughts and dozing students that went with lectures. Were they drawn by Professor Girard’s intensity or by all the adoration for him bubbling in the lecture hall?

The dead were easy enough to pick out—a young woman with a bashed-in skull, the wound caked black with blood, probably dead from a car accident; an elderly man in pajamas who had passed in his sleep. Alex let her eyes drift over them, careful not to let her notice linger. But one woman caught her eye—middle-aged, smooth dark brown hair in a braid, no sign of violence but spare in a way that said some disease had hollowed her out. Grays appeared as they had in death, and she was barefoot, wearing a hospital gown. She was watching the professor, but periodically she would turn to scan the room. It was the object on the desk in front of her that snagged Alex’s attention: She’d removed her wedding ring.

“If you’re not going to even take notes, why are you here?” Mercy whispered angrily.

Alex gave her head a shake. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize to me. You’re only hurting yourself.”

Alex could feel her eyebrows rising. She felt shitty about what had happened with Mercy, but she didn’t like being scolded. “Okay.”

“I’m not going to help dig you out if you fall behind.”

“I didn’t ask.”

“You know you will.”

Probably. If she was lucky enough to be around to take the final. The memory rose up again, the image of the empty throne beside Golgarot, the jeweled yoke in his hand. Alex was struggling to even imagine caring about how she finished the semester.

A kid wearing a beanie turned to glare and put a finger to his lips. Mercy stiffened. Alex wondered if this was the first time she’d been shushed in class. But Alex stayed quiet and tried to focus through the rest of the lecture. If she lived, her GPA was going to matter.

Girard was holding forth on what he called the holy trinity: Hamlet, Macbeth, and Othello, insisting that while they were traditionally described as tragic heroes, they were in fact inversions of Campbell’s hero’s journey. “They do what they believe they must,” Girard declared, “not what they should, and we can’t look away because their morality is so much closer to our own. Let’s think on their female counterparts and what role they play in this inversion as driver, foil, and victim.”

Girard finished up the lecture with a mention of his office hours, and Alex kept one eye on the woman in the hospital gown as they all filed out of the lecture hall.

“Are you trying to shake me?” she asked. Mercy was setting a ridiculous pace.